Inner Source in Product Line Engineering

While open source *software* helps you improve your products, open source *methods* help you improve your software development process. For a while now, large software vendors have been using open source methods in their firm-internal software development processes to make them more effective. Labeled “inner source”, the use of open source methods helps projects overcome lack of resources, innovation, and quality. In this presentation I will focus on the use of inner source in improving product line engineering. I will report about three case studies that we have carried out over the last few years, covering: problems in product line engineering, the promise of inner source, the challenges of applying inner source, and the solution adopted by our case study companies.